[Zope] Vote for Windowing Toolkit to use for Fat Client

[Hannu Krosing]

Chris Withers wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> A couple of us here at NIP are playing around with building a fat client for
> Zope, based on Python and hopefully using a ZEO connection to do most of the
> interaction.

So have I ;)

The plan is to do a ZEO version first and then "remote" it using some
XML-based 
protocol, most likely some extensions to current XML-RPC.

The ZEO version would run by definition with superuser privileges (i
guess), 
the remote version should be more restricted

> We're looking at both wxPython and Tkinter as possible windowing toolkits.
> 
> Which one would you choose?
> Why? ;-)

wxWindows of course.

Much more mature toolkit, more functionality out-of-box, 

Pros:

* looks native on any platform (currently only win32 and *nix, but Mac 
  seems to be in works and  possibly others too)

* has a good cross-platform editor widget (scintilla)

* fast

Cons:

* small beauty problems on GTK (tree icon background is not
transparent), 
  probably easy to fix

* native HTML rendering widget is very basic, and needs fixing specially
in 
  rendering tables (it does not even try to set column widths right). 
  OTOH it lets you embed native wxPython widgets.
  OTOOH you can always use external browser for preview.
  OTOOOH Tkinter has no HTML widget AFAIK.

Other:

* we would probably need to write special parsers for scintilla to get
most out 
  of syntax hiliting of dtml - the current ones (html and xml) are
mostly OK, but 
  could be improved upon. at least two would be needed one for SQL and
one for HTML

---------------
Hannu